In the regulatory vocabulary, an adverse event is any untoward medical occurrence in a patient who has been given a drug, whether or not the drug caused it. That is a reasonable definition for a form. The trouble is that the form’s language escaped into the room.

“There was an adverse event” is a sentence without a subject. Nothing was done; something occurred. A stroke, a seizure, a death from the medication: each is an event, and events, like weather, have no author. The phrase lets a clinician, a company, and a regulator all discuss the same harm without any of them having caused it.

The test Mamet proposes is to say the plain thing aloud. “The drug we gave her damaged her liver” is a sentence that demands a next sentence. “She experienced a hepatic adverse event” is a sentence that ends the conversation. The euphemism’s job is the full stop.